Making Photos Look Their Best

With the prevalence of digital cameras, it's easy to find kiosks to print your photos right off of your camera's memory card. But wouldn't you rather make some improvements first? Discover how Photoshop Elements 4 makes it easy it is to make your photos look better before you share them, whether it is by email or by printing them.

This chapter is from the book

Now that digital cameras are being used by most consumers, you can go to your favorite photo developer, plug your camera memory card into a kiosk, select your favorite shots, and—presto!—you have photographs. Although I can understand the appeal of popping in the media and receiving prints, I always want to fiddle with my photos a little (sometimes a lot) before I show them around. In this chapter, we'll discover how easy it is to make your photos look better before you share them, whether it is by email or by printing them.

There are only a few steps that are involved in making your photos look great, and while the steps are listed in their recommended order, it is not necessary to do them all—or any of them. After all, some pictures look perfect right out of the camera.

So, we'll begin with the first step—improving the composition.

Better Photos Through Cropping

Chapter 2 introduced the Crop tool and basic techniques for creating a good crop. Now that you know what it is, let's examine this important topic in more detail.

There are basically two reasons to crop a photo: To improve the composition of the subject in the photo and to change the aspect ratio to fit a standard photo size, if you plan to make prints of the photos. We'll begin by looking at how to crop for composition.

Cropping Controls What the Viewer Sees

To demonstrate how important cropping is in creating the overall visual impact of a photo, look at the original photo in Figure 3.1. I took this photo when our friends celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary and renewed their wedding vows—with their nine children in attendance.

Simple Rules of Composition

The rules for good composition apply to both taking the original photo and cropping it. You should either try to fill the frame with the subject (Figure 3.3), or follow the "rule of thirds" (see the sidebar, "The Rule of Thirds").

Figure 3.3 Cropping the photo to fill the frame is an effective solution.

The advantage of filling the frame with your subject is that it's simple to do. Here is how it is done:

Select the Crop tool—(C) or.

Click and drag the tool over the area to be selected. The area to be removed appears dark (Figure 3.4).

Adjust the handles to fine-tune the area to be cropped. You can move the entire crop selection marquee around the image by clicking inside the crop selection and dragging it to a new position.

When the composition looks right, either double-click inside the cropped area or click the Commit check mark in the lower part of the image.

The Rule of Thirds

With the rule of thirds, you mentally divide the crop area with two evenly spaced vertical lines and two evenly spaced horizontal lines, creating a grid of nine sections. To create a pleasing composition, the primary focal point of the image should fall at one of the line intersections. Avoid placing the focal point in the dead center of the image, as this generally creates a bland composition.

Making Photos Fit to Print

Most digital cameras create pictures with different ratios of height to width (called an aspect ratio) than traditional 35-mm film cameras. This difference determines what will and will not appear in a printed photo.

The dimensions of standard 35-mm film are 36 by 24 mm, which translates into an aspect ratio of 3:2. In contrast, typical digital camera sensors have an aspect ratio of 4:3. This means that your digital camera pictures are slightly taller or wider than those you take with your film camera. This affects what eventually ends up in your prints, and you should keep it in mind when cropping photos for printing. The loss isn't a lot, but this small loss can ruin a photo if the subject matter goes from edge to edge. Always try to leave a little space between the subject and the edge of your photos when taking your pictures to compensate for any edge loss when printing using standard photo sizes.

Note

If the photos are only to be shared electronically, aspect ratios do not affect the viewing.

How to Crop to a Print Size

The aspect ratio of all 35-mm film is 3:2 and the aspect ratio of standard photo sizes is different for each size. Figures 3.5–3.8 shows what is lost from a digital photo when printed using a few popular photo sizes.

Figure 3.5 Original Photo of the U.S. Supreme Court during the Cherry Blossom Festival.

When you have the image cropped the way you like it, click the Commit check mark at the bottom right of the image. Your photo is ready to be printed as a 4 x 6 without unexpected loss of material at the edges.

Fast Facts About Cropping

Here are some quick facts and tips about using the Crop tool that you should know about.

When you're finished using a preset crop setting, make it a habit to clear the Aspect Ratio setting by changing it to No Restriction in the Crop Tool Options bar. If you don't, the next time you use the Crop tool to make a freehand crop, you'll wonder why it doesn't work correctly.

To flip the width and the height settings in the Options bar, click the Swap Height and Width icon.

Pressing the Escape key clears the selected cropping area.

You can move the marquee to another position in the image by placing the pointer inside the bounding box and dragging.

You can change both the color and opacity of the crop shield (the cropped area surrounding the image) by changing the Crop tool preferences. Choose Edit, Preferences, Display & Cursors and specify a new Color and Opacity value in the Crop Tool area of the Preferences dialog (Figure 3.11). If you don't want to see a colored shield while cropping, deselect Use Shield.

Figure 3.11 The Crop Tool preferences can be adjusted for the photo you are working on.

Cropping Versus Picture Size

If you watch TV or go to the movies, you have probably seen a critical scene where someone asks a technician to zoom in on some part of a video or satellite photo, at which point, my favorite line is said: "Now enhance it." Amazingly, the blurred license plate or face or whatever suddenly comes into crystal-clear focus. Don't believe it—it only happens in the movies. The point is, when you crop away a large part of a photo to create the composition you want, be careful that you haven't reduced your photo to the size of a postage stamp. There are times when you must crop out a large percentage of a photo to get the composition that you want. At times like this, having a camera with a large sensor (4 or more megapixels) comes in handy.

If you want only to show the picture on the Web, the image size can be relatively small. If, on the other hand, you want to print a photo, you need to have enough remaining size to print the image at a resolution of 150 dots-per-inch (dpi) to get a crisp and clean photo.